NFHS Question

[scrounge]

Originally Posted by Robert Goodman

What'd he do, fan on it? I can only imagine you mean he touched it, resulting in a muff. That being the case leads to an interesting situation in Fed rules. Because the loose ball was still a kick (2-25-2), 8-5-3a.1 has it as a touchback. However, the facts of 8-5-2b also apply, making it a safety. The rules don't make either of these provisions an exception to the other.

I believe they intended for the result to be a safety, because otherwise the new force R1 applied to the ball would be inconsequential, and they must've meant it to have consequences.

There is no way this can be can be a safety. While it seems 8-5-2 would apply, this is a general section dealing with overall play. The more specific 8-5-3 would apply since that's specific to kicks. A basic rule of thumb is that the specific will always trump the general.

But we don't even need to go there, since - as is often the case - this seeming contradiction can be resolved by going back to the definitions. In 2-13-4, it clearly states that force is not a factor in this situation.

ART. 4 . . . Force is not a factor:

a. On kicks going into R's end zone, since these kicks are always a touchback regardless of who supplied the force.

Given this foundational definition, 8-5-2 cannot logically apply here.

(of course, all this is leaving aside why the play wasn't declared dead when the ball came to rest on the 1)